TV VOID

An educational film made by General Electric in the 1950′s. I think the first time I saw this film must have been in grade school. It has all the longwinded narration and silly animations that make it great. This is why you got in trouble for taking apart the toaster.
I remember [...]

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. It is also referred to as the “Red Planet” because of its reddish appearance, due to iron oxide prevalent on its surface.
Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface [...]

This film describes the reconnaissance that was necessary to find good landing spots for the upcoming Apollo missions. The Ranger series was the first U.S. attempt to obtain close-up images of the Lunar surface. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to fly straight down towards the Moon and send images back until the moment of [...]

Tom Smith headed up the Special Effects team at Industrial Light & Magic, where he created all the goodies for the ‘Star Wars’ films. This is his academic film masterwork, which took over a year to create, over 13 weeks to film, and utilized “traveling mattes,” with as many as five separate films running in [...]

The Space Race was an informal competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to see who could make the furthest advancements into space first. It involved the efforts to explore outer space with artificial satellites, to send humans into space, and to land them on the Moon.
The Space Race effectively began after the [...]

NASA’s Space Shuttle, officially called the Space Transportation System (STS), is the spacecraft currently used by the United States government for its human spaceflight missions. At launch, it consists of a rust-colored external tank (ET), two white, slender Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), and the orbiter, a winged spaceplane which is the space shuttle in the [...]

Here’s a couple of newsreels about where the race for space all started. On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and amateur radio operators all over the world received the signal.
Not to be outdone by the Soviets, the American space program Atlas about a year later broadcast a message from Dwight D. [...]

Narrated by Burgess Meredith. The Apollo 11 mission was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. It was the fifth human spaceflight of the Apollo program and the third human voyage to the moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar [...]

This is a 1961 film about the possibility of interplanetary travel using satellites for construction space vehicles. Lots of pretty colors and neat animations.

Who’s Out There (1975) is a film exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It is moderated by Orson Welles and has an appearance by Carl “Billions and Billions” Sagan.

In the 1960′s they launched satellites to survey the earth and the moon. Early scientific experiments only carried instruments into space. Later missions included experiments carrying plant and animal life. Nasa also sent deep space probes to examine the outer planets and Mars. As important as the data they recorded was the [...]